Government | People | Design | Technology

Author: Richard Fahey

Richard Fahey has a Masters Degree in Information Technology and Management, and is currently working as a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant at a large Consulting firm. He has a keen interest in Open Government and especially the use of Crowdsourcing platforms for citizen engagement. While a native of Ireland he has a great interest in US Government developments in the areas of Transparency, Collaboration and Participation. For more information follow me on Twitter @faheyr.

The recently announced UK Government Spending Challenge, has this week, invited members of the public to send in their ideas on how to get value for public money.

The UK Spending Challenge was announced last month, but was initially only open to public servants. As Chancellor George Osbourne explained above, the response from public servants has been impressive. It has yielded over 60,000 ideas in just two weeks:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron kicked off a consultation exercise on ways to reduce government spending. Together with Nick Clegg he has written to public service workers asking them to share their ideas on where to make spending cuts.

Gordon Brown’s speech last week on “Building Britain’s Digital Future”, covered a wide range of topics, but focused particularly how digital technologies such as the “semantic web” could drive a radical reshaping of government and its interactions with citizens.